An American employed by a courier service has been taken into custody in Sri Lanka for trying to smuggle 74 Buddhist artifacts out of the country. The objects were allegedly headed to an art gallery in San Francisco.

“An explosion” of looting in Libya’s Roman cities has occurred since the country opened to the West in 2003, according to Gaetano Palumbo of the World Monuments Fund. The heads of statues are particularly prized.  

Archaeologists working at the Maya trading port of Moral-Reforma in Balancan, Mexico, are excavating a main level of a pyramid covered with soil. They have found a series of altars, masks, small sculptures, stones, spear points, and little limestone heads painted green.   

City officials in Franklin, Tennessee, are still discussing what to do with the remains of a Union soldier that turned up at the future site of a Chick-Fil-A. “Within a quarter-mile radius, I bet there’s more,” commented archaeologist Larry McKee.  

Two Cape Cod boys looking for their ball in a sand pit discovered human bones and alerted the police. “It looked like a piece of coral. It was old,” said Chatham Police Lt. Michael Anderson.  

Who was buried at the royal cemetery of Sutton Hoo?  

How have past generations responded to climate change? A long-term, international study is examining how people adjusted their settlement structures, food procurement strategies, and household architecture. “It has been possible to evaluate the relative advantages and disadvantages of past cultural practices in the face of environmental change and establish lessons that will contribute to contemporary mitigation strategies,” said Jago Cooper of the University of Leicester.  

“Gigapixel” pictures, developed for the NASA rovers on Mars, are a new tool available to archaeologists.  See if you can spot someone working at the Great Temple Excavation at Petra using the “GigaPan” image at National Geographic News.  

The state of Florida and the Historical Museum of Southern Florida are $250,000 short of the amount needed to construct a modest park at the site of the Miami Circle. The cost of the land was $27 million.

A 4,000-year-old skeleton bearing traces of leprosy has been found at Balathal, in Rajasthan, India.

Part of a 300-year-old broom made of twigs was unearthed in a Benedictine monastery latrine in Germany.  

Students from Washington & Lee University have excavated thousands of artifacts from the home of Edmund Bacon, who worked at Monticello as Thomas Jefferson’s overseer from 1806 until 1822. “We don’t know very much about the middle ground of society,” said their instructor, Alison Bell.  

Sculptures that were part of a giant Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair are being excavated by archaeologist Francois Gentili from an ice chest at the site of a seventeenth-century chateau. “It is as if someone wanted to provide them with a grave,” he said.  

Homo heidelbergensis individuals were predominately right-handed, if the marks on their teeth were made while holding on to meat they were cutting with stone tools. “Most hominins, even early hominins, are going to be bright enough not to bring a blade up to their noses,” commented biological anthropologist Travis Pickering of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

Radiocarbon dating shows that Gypsum Cave in Nevada has been used by humans for about 4,000 years for hunting and ceremonial purposes. Packrats moving artifacts around had interfered with early attempts to date the cave.  

BBC News has pictures of the Bronze Age road made of tree branches that was discovered in Swansea.  

And there’s more information on the earliest known irrigation system in the southwestern U.S. from the Los Angeles Times. The system could have watered between 60 and 100 acres of corn and amaranth, and dates to at least 1200 B.C.  

Here’s a better photograph of the rock-art image of a marsupial lion that was recently discovered in Australia.